Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Wednesday May 21, 2014 @01:15PM
from the media-is-dead dept.

mrspoonsi (2955715) writes "BBC Reports: 'Computer and Video Games, which in 1981 was the world's first magazine dedicated to gaming, is facing closure. The title, which has been online-only since 2004, may stop publishing at the end of a 45-day consultation period that began on 14 May, sources said. However, its publishers, Future, are also believed to be looking into selling off the brand. The magazine is behind the gaming industry's Golden Joystick Awards, a yearly event held since 1983. Early issues of the magazine were seen as being instrumental in helping small-time games developers to get their titles out there, said Mr Henderson — a trend that he thought was beginning to re-emerge as apps and mobile gaming have taken off.'"

If this strikes a chord with you I would recommend listening to the first episode of A Life Well Wasted, chronicling the (initial) death of Electronic Gaming Monthly.
http://alifewellwasted.com/200... [alifewellwasted.com]

IMHO, Byte died long before it stopped printing. In 1987, tax laws were changing, and magazine subscriptions would no longer be a professional expense. So they offered a 6 years for $99 subscription rate, and I took it because I didn't want to have to mess with resubscribing every year. By 1993, the articles were basically all PC and MS-DOS centric (with the occasional token Mac or Amiga or Atari ST article), and a significant percentage were software reviews. The only thing left that I cared about was Jerr

I didn't realize it was still going. I still have some old issues from the Sinclair Spectrum era lying around somewhere.

Depends what you mean by "still going" as the original magazine ceased publishing almost ten years ago (*) when Future publishing bought the title (apparently it overlapped with their own GamesMaster magazine, which is still going today in its printed form (**)).

I don't know how much continuity there was before and after that takeover, though to be fair, the title had already been sold previously, from its original publishers EMAP, to Dennis Publishing.

At 57, I don't recall that particular magazine. I certainly had several different books and magazines for entering in codes on my Sinclair, Color Computer, and IBM. But I really didn't subscribe to any outside of physical gaming ones (The Dragon, White Dwarf, Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer, Autoduel Quarterly). While I did play games on my systems, generally it was the shareware stuff up to Commander Keen, Castle Wolfenstein, and Doom, which I picked up, news wise, from usenet and ftp download sites before purchasing the actual games. Then Quake, Duke Nukem, and Hexen:) In the mid-90's it was recommendations from my Lan party friends. Command and Conquer, Red Alert, Starcraft, and Brood War were the ones I most remember. We did play some Carmageddon and Splat Pack from time to time:) There were plenty of other games I picked up after that like Diablo and Diablo II or Dungeon Keeper or, what was that name, Black and White? I think I still have the CDs. Now I play Rocksmith on my PC, run RPG's (Deadlands now), and play board games. Too many quick twitch kids out there for me to have fun on line.

49 here, and I'm not sure what a gamer would need a magazine for, either, today. Ten years ago, before the internets and the googles were everywhere, they were still a good idea. In fact, many of the computer and gaming magazines from the '80s and '90s have been scanned, and you can find PDFs of them, because the information is still interesting and useful to retro-gamers.

And the reason you've never heard of them is probably because it's a UK magazine, which a quick check of the first link in TFS would rev

Why are you so derisive of youth? It isn't their fault that they grew up in a more technologically advanced world than you did. How is it reasonable to expect that they would have an intuitive grasp of a history that they did not live and that is largely irrelevant to their day-to-day lives?

I don't know if you're trolling or not, but 1983 was the year of the Video Game Crash, when video games as an industry nearly died because of insanely high game prices ($80+ in 1980s dollars, a price that stayed until the middle of the N64/PSX era) and the proliferation of shovelware by companies looking to make a quick buck. Game reviewers were almost nonexistent - most of the time, they were side-panels in general computer magazines.

The fact that a magazine dedicated to reviews came out was huge, because

Of course I didn't mean that. Any stupidity was in your interpretation of my post.

On the contrary, I was the only person to guess you *might* not have meant that (*). That's what everyone else thought... quite reasonably, as it *would be* the most sensible interpretation assuming you'd actually bothered to read the summary!! That makes clear that the magazine hasn't been sold in printed form for almost a decade. In that context, saying "I'm not sure what a gamer would need a magazine for" serves no purpose unless it referred to the years it *was* being published (i.e. 1981 to 2004).

A web site isn't a good medium for discussing the ever shifting nature of game platforms?

Certainly. But what puts the CVG website above, say, Reddit in that regard? There's no obvious way to go from a magazine that's a collection of game reviews to a discussion forum, since the former is made by its staff and the latter by its members. If anything, having a pre-existing brand might make it harder to the perceived need to upkeep said brand by policing and thus limiting the discussion.

Okay, I'm being pedantic here, but this is one of my pet peeves. "Computer Gaming" is not Gaming. It is a lesser thing--a subset of the greater whole.

This was not the first gaming magazine-- Games magazine came out in 1977 and The Dragon was in 1976. Both of these magazines were dedicated to gaming (with Games being the more general use of that term).

A frustrating but inescapable fact about the English language is that it is a true democracy.

The meanings of words, in common use, are defined by the vote of the masses. There is no regulatory authority that says what meanings a word can and cannot have...there are only teams of lexicographers who document the meaning-decisions that the masses have already made.

If "RPG" refers to a type of computer game these days, then that's what it means now. Maybe it didn't use to, but it does now.

It's an add thing, I found the lack of magazines in the US really weird when I was over there and that was 15+ years ago. They only seemed to be in bookshops. Over in the UK, they're everywhere and hundreds of different ones. Newsagents, super markets, petrol stations, music shops, pretty much everywhere except book shops.

Well supermarkets certainly still carry magazines. Gas stations and convenience stores also have a small magazine rack. Music shops don't seem to carry any though (I'm thinking instrument shops and not places where you buy CDs). Book shops seem to have the largest selection of magazines though. Most places have a pretty common set of magazines though. I pick up 2600, various music specific magazines, some science type magazines, and an English motorcycle magazine or two if they're available.

Yeah, thanks for the snark. I've been over a few times and traveled there a lot, either driving around the east coat or staying in cities. Either way, I found magazines pretty scarce compared to what I was used to.

It's an explainable thing. The UK magazines market was largely driven by W H Smith. Not only because of their shops, but they were a wholesaler too, so a lot of the other newsagents were selling merchandise sourced from W H Smith.

And W H Smith started out as a chain of railway station concessions. People bought books and magazines to read on the train.

With a lesser railway system, and more people travelling by horse and then car in the USA, the train station bookstall/newsagent phenomenon didn't take off in the same way.

For me, Metacritic replaces any "IGN, Gamespot, CVG" review.Metacritic might be full of "fake and childish" user scores, but overall, the user scores are alot more accurate than the "paid for" reviews most websites dish out.

I started getting C&VG from the first issue. Back then they were mainly a magazine full of BASIC listings for the Atari 800, BBC, Apple, TRS80, MZ80K, ZX81 etc. They also had ongoing tutorials on adventure game writing and the like. More bizarrely, they also had a play by mail space game, which I never played (had to pay as I remember) which featured every issue. You posted your next moves and got a computer print out of the results a few weeks later. You thought waiting for cassettes to load was slow gameplay? Pah!
For me though, it was key. I first learned programming by typing in the Atari 800 listings (which never worked first time) by checking the typos then working out 'ah, that must be what changes the colour of the border' etc. Between the monthly listings and a BASIC primer, I was away. Later on I moved onto 6502 assembler and later C once I had an Atari ST. Somehow that chain of events resulted in me writing systems generating millions in revenue for banks. Thanks C&VG!
I did stop getting the magazine after a few years but decided to submit a game I had in mind. I pulled out all the stops, wanting it to be the best Atari game they'd published. It had (ignore if you're not an Atari 8bit type) multiple DLIs, redefined character sets, sprites, assembler subroutines and all sorts of twiddly things. I then went and bought an issue to get the address to send my masterpiece to. Arse, they'd stopped doing listings several issues earlier.:-(

"You posted your next moves and got a computer print out of the results a few weeks later. You thought waiting for cassettes to load was slow gameplay?"Ah, our age is showing....I once played chess with my best friend via postcard when I moved out of state years ago (towards the end of the Mesozoic era...). That game took nearly two years to complete.

I consider it a high point in gaming for me. It was the finest play either of us ever accomplished, as we had a lot of time to consider moves. It ended in a dr

I have my stacks of C&VG stored on one of my shelves. Got close to 90% of the issues I think.

They really were something else. The writing on the longer pieces was top notch, and the news and previews had lots of exclusives. They had really connected writers. And those front pages... best ever.The 90s were not too kind to it as it had to fight more kiddy targeting publications and all the media was fed through the same hose. At least we got Edge from then on.

Hopefully they don't get slashdotted. Wow, was it really 30 years ago that I started typiing in games by hand from this magazine.... then realised that I could modify and adapt them the more I leant about BASIC. Result : 20 year career in IT coming up this July.